Five years ago, Kendall Weistroffer had almost no connection to Judaism. The Colorado native rarely stepped foot in a synagogue, hadn’t celebrated a bat mitzvah and seemed as likely to study Finnish as Hebrew. She eventually met Rabbi Michael Sunshine, director of Jewish Student Connection, a network of Jewish high school discussion groups in Denver,…
In her travels throughout St. Louis as coordinator of the Student-to-Student program, Fawn Chapel has gotten to hear some humorous questions regarding Jewish life and culture. “One time, a kid asked, ‘So if you read backwards, do you also speak backwards?’” Chapel recalled. Other favorites include “Do you celebrate birthdays?” and “Can you celebrate Thanksgiving?”…
Getty Images (JTA) — With the new school year nearly upon us, Jewish educational leaders are scrambling to prepare their teachers to discuss this summer’s Gaza War. The most pressing challenge is to design age-appropriate conversations: At which grade level might classroom discussions include potentially frightening topics, such as the wounding of non-combatants, kidnapping of young…
The 9-year-old girl was unusually quiet that Sunday evening at supper. Her parents thought that maybe she was tired. After all, she had worked all afternoon in the family’s booth at The Shalom Y’all Food Festival in Forsyth Park. Finally, the girl told her parents that she wanted to talk about that morning’s class at…
I recently observed the following conversation between a mother and her 2 or 3 year old son. We were all at a coffee shop, I was catching up on some work for my health coaching certification on my iPad and at the table next to me this mother-and-son duo were enjoying an afternoon snack. The…
Getty Images (JTA) — When the parents of three school-age children sat down with their financial adviser to try to figure out how to minimize their anticipated private school tuition bill of $810,000 through high school, they came up with a plan that shrunk the bill by $163,000. How’d they do it? Well, mostly by pre-paying,…
(JTA) — A special panel tasked with examining the governance and strategic vision of the Claims Conference is recommending that the organization shift its long-term focus to Holocaust education and remembrance, JTA has learned. The panel was appointed last year following a scandal involving the Claims Conference’s failure to detect a $57 million fraud scheme…
Orthodox yeshivas are poised to opt out of the largest free universal prekindergarten program in the country, one that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio says he created with them in mind. Despite months of talks between New York City officials and Orthodox leaders, activists say that they now don’t expect many yeshivas to…
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